Asteroid may hit Mars next month!

Well every time the DoD says it costs to much it goes black and they double the funding... Don't forget that missing 3.5 trillion... that's a lot of beans...
I am more concerned about what they are teaching our kids in school these days

Physcis Forum

...assessment of the feasibility of diverting asteroid 1981 Midas into a collision with Earth in the year 2018. I'm posting this to show the potential military-political advantage to controlling access to space....

www.physicsforums.com...

Okay I bet this guy has the DoD in his future job options

Its funny the things you find... just as a side note...

Two shuttles under military command were shown in the 1998 movie Armageddon. Designated X-71s, they were named Freedom and Independence. Again, however, these shuttles were not particularly covert - internal dialogue in the film plainly stated that they were to be replacements for the "original shuttles," and were to be publicly announced and rolled out in a lavish ceremony in a few months, had not the asteroid crisis arisen before that could happen.

WIKI

[edit on 24-12-2007 by zorgon]

reply to post by zorgon

Now what your looking at here is a 'possible' control device on the Asteroid Eros... taken by ESA...

Could be, but, who does it belong to?

It could also be an ET bungalow. Are there any other pictures of control devices to do a comparison?

On the very large end of the scale, a meteoroid of 1000 tons (9 x 10^5 kg) would retain about 70% of its cosmic velocity, and bodies of over 100,000 tons or so will cut through the atmosphere as if it were not even there. Luckily, such events are extraordinarily rare.

www.amsmeteors.org...

Edited to add info and remove last question because the answer is contained herein.




[edit on 24-12-2007 by Siren]

The odds have now been lowered to a 1-in-25 chance, although they do say that the odds of these kinds of things usually peak before plummeting. Either way, it's going to be close. Wouldn't Mars' gravity pull WD5 toward it?

www.msnbc.msn.com...

It's not just gravity at play here, its speed and trajectory. If it gets close enough to be affected by Mars' gravity and its shallow enough, into the atmosphere it will go. If its just far enough away, it will slingshot out (like what we do with some of our robotic probes that do it to speed up their trip through the solar system). A 1 in 25 chance is good enough for me - my guess is it hits Mars. Most astronomical odds are hundreds times higher. A 4% chance is awesome.

UPDATE!

They have just adjusted the odds to:

1:28 Odds!

reply to post by mel1962


Not much of an adjustment. These odds are about as high in favor of a fairly major impact as I have ever noticed. Much like a weather forecaster will almost never say "100% chance of rain day after tomorrow", I doubt anybody would predict a hit with this rock until it was so close they knew they couldn't be wrong.

The latest information (obtained directly from Donald Yeomans at JPL) has been calculated using orbital elements derived from a 55 day observational arc.....

Date : 2008 January 30
Time: 11:46 UT
Distance: 10.4 Mars radii (approx. 35300 kms from the centre of the planet)

That's about 1.5 times the distance to the outermost satellite, Deimos. The impact probability has been reduced slightly to 3.6%.


[edit on 8-1-2008 by Mogget]

reply to post by Mogget


Well, it looks like the asteroid is going to miss hitting Mars. There is only a 1:10,000 chance now or 0.01%!

Too Bad, that would have been one heck of a show!


Asteroid will miss Mars!

[edit on 1/12/08 by mel1962]

Originally posted by mel1962
Too Bad, that would have been one heck of a show!

Yes, it's a shame that 2007 WD5 will miss Mars at the end of this month. Those two spacecraft in orbit around the planet (Mars Express, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) could have taken some spectacular photos of the asteroid as it approached, and then impacted the planet.